No, the Chrome Web Store does not offer to watch movies online for free: it’s a scam

The Google Chrome Web Store does not win for startles. If in the past you have had problems with adware , data collection , mining of cryptocurrencies or fraudulent clones , now you have them with alleged movies that can be viewed online through your themes for the browser. But no, none of that.

To warn the problem, it is enough to look up the name of a popular movie or directly introduce the typical tags that people use to find a movie available to watch directly from the network, something like “watch full hd”.

This is the nth problem of fraudulent content in the Chrome Web Store

In the first case, the logical thing would be to come to Chrome add-ons related to film production, but while this serious problem of spam is not resolved what we will see are supposed extensions, and especially issues, that appear to offer those titles. Although they are not real extensions, nor themes, nor movies online. Rather they are a scam .

The surprise: subscription services and even charges on bank cards

Detail of one of the supposed movies offered in the Chrome Web Store in which an important work of positioning in search engines is appreciated in the title and description.

When one of these themes is installed, the colors of Google Chrome change as they would with any other theme. But the intention of the creators of this elaborate deception is that you click on the links in the topic file . “Click to see the full movie now,” they say.

If we obey and click, we arrive by means of a shortened link with the shortening domain of Twitter to a site called Vioos.co, a website that could well be in the style of many others that offer free viewing of online movies . But by many tests that we realize, the result is not the awaited one . All we get is to reach portals in which we are invited to create user accounts to access streaming and downloads. With similar claims, the logical thing is to suspect.

Part of the subjects that seem to offer watching movies online for free have hundreds and even a couple of thousand downloads

In other redirections to other portals, as they have checked in TorrentFreak , who first reported this fact, they reach sites that are blocked by MalwareBytes due to the suspicion of fraud and, if this blocking is avoided, another site is observed that requires subscription. According to reports, former users of the portal complain that they are charged on their credit cards .

Despite not being able to obtain figures of people affected in relation to subscribers, it is easy to verify that the different subjects that seem to offer watching movies online for free have hundreds and even a couple of thousand installations.

Google seems to be taking action in the matter deleting these issues, since some of them have disappeared while preparing this article, but what also seems to be clear is that the controls of the Chrome Web Store are not enough and recurrently different types of threats achieve penetrate the star browser store.